Question in title
How how long would it take and how much would it cost to make a pizza from scratch by growing all the plants and animals, turning the raw wheat into dough, milk into cheese, tomatoes into sauce, and pork into sausage or pepperoni?
6 months
It really depends.
Lets cut the veggies, grain, and dairy outta the equasion. Wheat takes 120 days. For simplicity here, we're gonna round out to months.
Wheat and tomatoes are seasonal crops, lets say its early 1920, and you can get canned goods, but rely on local meat.
If you buy a pig at birthing age, you got about 3 months for pork products, after the Sow's first litter. If you are buying a new born piglet, you got about 5 months before her first litter is solid for pork product harvest.
The beef is the problem.
From Veal to plate, you have a solid 20 months for pizza grade cheese.
You could do a 6 month harvest, but its gonna be slim weight and wasteful. As a early Agricultural farmer, it isnt worth it.
A pizza takes a whole lot of different climates and seasons to make. Someone in the past COULD do it, but it would be so absurdly planned ahead, there would be a trial.
Cost would range from your life, to your estate, to $50 and a butcher.
The longest wait is the curing of pepperoni. Modern day, you need a proper curing set up and time.
Lets say a year and $98,000, cost of the care of the rearing of pork, processing, and space needed.
This doesnt account for buying the land and machines, as well as all the required processing licenses.
That estimate is figuring you already have a dairy cow, and the ability and space to turn milk to cheese.
Modern day, nothing to pizza? youd spend millions. House, land, taxes, cattle, permits, equipment, etc.
Probably at least a hundred days, that's how long it'd take for wheat to grow. The rest would be faster and can mostly be done simultaneously. Longer if you need to raise the pig from birth to slaughter (18-30 weeks)
A guy did this with a chicken sandwich a few years ago.
'How to make everything' youtube. I think it was 18 months and around 6000 dollars
Is a chicken sandwich cheaper now because of economies of scale? That and how our food-chickens are an abomination against nature.
To think about it, a pizza isn't that different from a plowman's lunch. (Substitute an apple for the tomato.) Actually the ancient Roman pisna couldn't have been that unaffordable.
A cow is approximately 2 years old when it can first have a calf and begin producing milk. I think that’s the longest of any of the ingredients.
I think the hardest part would the the land required tbh.
I raise my own pigs. Raised up to 360lbs it took 6 months and cost tiened out to be about $1.50/lbs.
A dairy cow could run you like $500-$1500 to buy at the age she could breed. Then if she wasn't bred, then you would need get her bred using AI or a stud bull. Which could be anywhere between $50-$2500+.
Tomatoes, like $2 for a packet with like 50 seeds or more.
Wheat. Seeds are relatively cheap but you need some good acreage to make enough flour for 2cups worth.
You would need a sickle and grain mill if you wanted to don't by hand. Another $500+
However. All of this said, you will get a ton more than just a pizza worth of food from most of this. 350lbs of.pork lasts two.of us a year. A dairy cow can produce up to like 10 gallons of milk a day, for 6+months. That's a lot of calories in itself. Tomatoes, you only.need like 2 Roma Tomatoes for the sauce. The rest you can can for the years supply. And as I said before, the wheat is the hardest part as it takes some good acreage to produce alot of flour.
I've done this for years except we use goats for the meat and cheese.
Well if you're going to do that you should probably make more than two.
Are we counting the land and equipment you'd need to raise the animals and process everything? Because cattle need a lot of land to graze, so you're looking at a hefty upfront cost that will vary depending on land values in your area. Or, if you were going to raise the animals in some suburban backyard with no livestock bylaws, you'd need to buy a lot of feed, and prices are insane right now.
Are you comfortable slaughtering and processing the animals yourself? Do you have the equipment for that? Are you counting the costs of building a cold room so the cheese can age for a year? Do you have a wheat mill? Are you set up to can your tomato sauce? Do you have a meat grinder and a smoking shed? Because the meat and the tomatoes and the wheat will all be ready at different times if you live anywhere that gets snow, so you'll need to preserve everything and then assemble the pizza.
How much are you calculating your wages per hour at? Are you including the cost of educating yourself on how to farm, raise animals and process the products? Are you raising the milk cow from calf, and waiting for it to lactate?
Are you buying or building the wheat mill?
Some of these have already been answered on the "how to make everything " YouTube.
There are a lot of spices in PepperoniSource: https://tasteofartisan.com/make-pepperoni-sausage/Quote: The dominating spice in this sausage is paprika, which gives it a characteristic orange color. You will also find aromatic spices such as anise, allspice, fennel, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, mustard and black pepper among the commonly used spices in pepperoni sausage. Many recipes also add cayenne pepper for a little kick."
Some like fennel, cayenne and mustard, you could grow easily, but other require mature trees (allspice, nutmeg).
But, there are a lot of other sausages with simpler ingredients, though I expect black pepper to be part of pretty much any of them.
I know your question relates to pizza, but here is a great video about a guy doing exactly what you ask, only it's a sandwich (the rest of his Chanel is similar stuff, pretty cool) :
Cost would potentially be pretty trivial, you could probably get all the seeds you need for under $10. Getting a cow that produces milk would be the hardest and most expensive part. They reach reproductive maturity at about age 1, and pregnancy is about 9 months, so if you have to start with newborn animals, that's how long it would take to make your pizza: 21 months. Mozzarella can be made very quickly, but if you want parmesan too, you'll need to age it a minimum of 12 months.
There was a guy a few years ago who made a chicken sandwich from scratch, I don't remember how long it took him though.